Pet owners have a responsibility for the proper care of their pets. This care includes providing adequate food and water, and appropriate shelter. The sheltering is of additional import in areas where the weather can reach relative extremes of cold and heat. While some pet owners elect to keep their pets—and in particular dogs—continually outdoors, the extreme temperatures during the winter and summer months can prove detrimental to the pet's health and even result in weather-related death.
Many pet owners enjoy having their dogs indoors. As such, the dogs must be periodically exercised outdoors so that they can perform their bodily elimination requirements. Many individuals will utilize a pet crate to aid in training the dog to eliminate out-of-doors to avoid accidents indoors. Also, many dogs are left inside of the home while family members are at work, attending school, or engaging in other activities outside of the home. When a dog is left at home alone, the homeowner has essentially three options: leaving the pet out-of-doors during the duration of the pet owner's absence; allowing the pet to roam the interior of the home until the owner returns; or crating the pet for the duration of the pet owner's absence.
Likewise, there may be situations in which a pet owner is desirous of keeping a dog crated even though the pet owner is at home. Furthermore, even in this scenario, there are instances where it would be desirable to have the pet confined within a crate, but with free access to an area outside of the home. For example, such an arrangement would aid pet owners having a dog recovering from surgery, recovering from an ailment, aged and/or incontinent, and for whom there is a need to go outside at will while being prevented from harming the inside of the home if left to roam at will.
A partial solution to this problem has been the installation of pet doors, which are permanently installed in a wall of the home structure or in an exterior door, thereby permitting the dog free access into and out of the home. In this manner, a dog that is house trained can freely exit the home to do its “duty” and then to return to the interior.
However, this does not present a complete solution for many homeowners whom do not wish to allow their dogs to have free roaming access to the interior of the home. Accordingly, it would be highly desirable to provide an apparatus that would enable a pet owner to keep a pet crated while indoors, while facilitating free egress through a pet door to access an area outside of the home. It would be beneficial to provide such an apparatus having a collapsible construction facilitating transport and storage of the apparatus in a non-deployed state.